As more people turn to electronic communications for their social and professional interaction with others, people are finding their electronic communications interfaces becoming duplicative and difficult to manage. As a result, universal electronic messaging systems have been developed that allow users to obtain updates from their friends and some of their favorite social networks and websites. Such systems allow users to, for example, publish their status and broadcast it to their friends, and view updates from their friends from one or more sources, such as social networks (e.g., Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and AIM). A user's communications may be aggregated on a universal messaging system and across the Web, so that the user can obtain updates in one convenient place. Users may also use the universal system to update their friends on what the user is doing by issuing only one post, while setting a status on networks such as AIM, Facebook, and Twitter.
In some systems, users may have options for setting their status. They can simply find an input field at the top of a browser or mobile interface, and enter the text they would like to share. They can also update their status by typing a status message from a phone with SMS or text message capabilities. Users may also easily add photos from a listing of friends (such as a “Buddy List”) just by clicking into the status box at the top of the list and selecting the photos to upload.
In some cases, it may be desirable to associate a user's location with a user's status update and/or photo. For example, if a user is using a mobile device to interact with a universal messaging system, the user may want other people to know where the user was when the status update and/or photo was created. The user may also want other users to know more about that location. As a result, universal systems have been provided with features through which a latitude and longitude, location name, and/or map can be associated with a status update and/or photo. While this may give other users more information about that particular message, it does not provide a sufficient way for users to follow and keep track of a particular location.
In addition, in view of the large quantity of incoming status updates and photos that a single user may receive from across one or more social networks and friends, it may be desirable to filter out some of those communications. Past efforts have only focused on filtering out particular types of communications or senders of communications. However, these prior techniques do not provide a sufficient way for users to perform targeted filtering or hiding of communications relating to locations that are not of interest, or specific words or phrases.
The disclosed embodiments of the present disclosure are directed to overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above. Among other things, the disclosed embodiments include systems and methods for location tracking, and filtering or hiding electronic communications.